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Mandriva acquires Lycoris

The biggest Mandriva news in the past month was the acquisition of
Lycoris, the popular Linux distribution aimed at novice users.
Mandriva has acquired Lycoris' main assets and the services of Joseph
Cheek, founder of Lycoris. Joe will be working on integrating the best
features of Lycoris into Mandriva Linux, especially into the Discovery
product aimed at new Linux users. We hope to bring the strong
community of Lycoris users into the Mandriva community via the Club,
so welcome them when they get here! See the press release for more=20
details. If you want to see what features Lycoris will be bringing to=20
the Mandriva party, you can order now the Lycoris Desktop/LX 1.4 Gold
Edition Bundle, too.
--> http://www.mandriva.com/company/press/pr?n/pr/corporate/2556
--> http://store.mandriva.com/product_info.php?products_id224

This month saw the release of the second version of Multi Network
Firewall, the Mandriva distribution specifically tailored for
infrastrcture and security use. MNF 2 provides enterprise-class
capabilities like IDS, VPN, traffic shaping, P2P traffic filtering
and network interface bonding and bridging for a single competitive
price with no complicated client licenses. There are also several
enterprise level support options for MNF, depending on how much
support your organisation may need. You can buy MNF 2 - on CD, or as
a direct download - from the Mandriva Store or via our volume
purchasing program, PSMP.
--> http://store.mandriva.com
--> http://www.mandriva.com/psmp

Limited Edition 2005 KDE 3.4 Club release available

During some of the recent changes at Mandriva, we set out a policy to
provide regular updated releases of Mandriva exclusively for Club
members. The first of these, an updated version of Limited Edition
2005 with the addition of KDE 3.4, was released this month. These
releases will not be officially supported, but they're still a great
way for Club members to get their hands on the latest new features
first! You can read the announcement of the release at the link below,
and Club members can download it via Bittorrent (or, if Bittorrent is
inconvenient, via FTP by request) from the download page. Try it
today! If you want to update even more software, you can update the
KDE office suite, KOffice, to version 1.4 using the packages created
by the KOffice team. These packages, for Limited Edition 2005, are
available at the page below.
--> http://www.mandrivaclub.com/article.php?sid3919
--> http://download.kde.org/download.php?urlstable/koffice-1.4/

Mandriva news
----------------------------------------
New Club site beta available to members

Big changes are coming to the Mandriva Club this summer. The biggest
change of all is a complete overhaul of the Club website to a new,
Wiki-based design. After much work, the new site is now accessible as
a beta test for all Club members to try out! You can access it at this
address: http://club-beta.mandriva.com. Please report any problems,
and since the new design is intended to be edited by Club members as
well as Club staff, go ahead and edit or add information wherever you
can, especially in the Knowledge Base!

New Mandriva services authentication system installed

Another important change happening this month is the introduction of a
new authentication system for Mandriva services. Previously,
authentication for our various services - Mandriva Club, Mandriva
Online and so on - was handled by several separate systems. Thanks to
some hard work by our IS team, a new, centralised and more reliable
system has been introduced to take over authentication duties for all
Mandriva services. With this change comes an important change for all
users of Mandriva services: under the new system, you now have a
single user ID, which is your registered email address. Your Club
nickname, for instance, is no longer your user ID for the Club.=20

The new system has a front end where you can register for an account
or change the details of your existing account. In case of any
problems, please try logging in to the front end first. If the
problems persist, you can submit reports via the contact form at the=20
address below.=20

One important change Club members must make with the new system is to
remove any urpmi media they may have for Club RPMs, then re-add them
with email address as user ID, instead of Club nickname as was
previously the case. Finally, the new system caused a small problem
in the Club download section. If you see no torrents listed on your
download page, log out of your Club account, remove all cookies from
the Club website, and log in again to fix the problem.
--> https://my.mandriva.com
--> https://my.mandriva.com/contact/

Name contest winners announced!

As we mentioned in a previous newsletter, we ran a contest to see
which Club member could come up with the best idea for spreading the
new name of the company far and wide. This month, the winners of the
contest were announced! So congratulations to Nicholas Page, who won
an HP laptop, to Jean-Philippe Gaulier, who won a Globetrotter, to
Boudha Rejoui, who won a copy of Move with a 128MB USB key, and to
Derek Pope, Archil, Greg Martyn, Rapha=C3=ABl Jadot, Adrian Berindei,
Erich Kitzm=C3=BCller, Julien Stickel and Xavier Moucheron, all of whom
won three month extensions of their Club membership! You can see a
list of the winning ideas, some of which have already been
implemented and the rest of which are being worked on, here.
--> http://www.mandrivaclub.com/article.php?sid3984

Google contest begins!

One of the winning suggestions in the name contest was to start a
Google contest for Mandriva pages. The contest is now underway! On
July 31st, the owner of the highest-ranked Mandriva-related personal
page on Google will win a Globetrotter - so start polishing your site
today! More details at the Club article.
--> http://www.mandrivaclub.com/article.php?sid4069

Mandriva eTraining goes into public beta

The new Mandriva eTraining program (which takes over from the old
Campus program) is now available as a public beta. All Club members
have free access to the program, and members who contribute to the
program could have their membership upgraded or extended. For those
who are not yet Club members, a free Club membership can be had by
designing a course for the program! Check it out here.
--> http://etraining.mandriva.com/

eCards available for Mandriva Club members

One of the winning ideas from the Club name contest was to allow Club
members to send Mandriva themed eCards, and this idea has now been
brought to life! Club members can go to this page to send Mandriva
eCards to anyone. Try it today!
--> http://www.mandrivaclub.com/EcardMDV/index.php

Mandriva announces support contract with MACIF

Showcasing Mandriva's enterprise support capabilities, a large scale
support contract was recently announced with MACIF, the top European
insurance company. Mandriva will provide level 3 Linux technical
support for MACIF's network. You can read the press release here.
--> http://www.mandriva.com/company/press/pr?n/pr/business/2558

Academia program unveiled

Mandriva's new program for educational institutions, Academia, was
unveiled this month. Academia is more than just a distribution for
the educational market - it is a complete package of software,
support and licensing. Academia provides a special education edition
of the Mandriva Linux operating sytem along with services and an
ownership scheme that ease large-scale deployment of Linux. Academia
is sold to educational bodies on an unlimited site license basis.
Only one license is needed to be able to run Mandriva Linux on all
the computers of a given site. This means that there's a single price
for an unlimited number of installations. If Academia sounds like the
right thing for your school, you can read more about the program
here.
--> http://www.mandriva.com/business/academia

Planet Mandriva is born

Did you know that many Mandriva employees and contributors have blogs
or journals? Planet Mandriva, a collection of all these journals, was
born this month! At a glance, you can see the latest entries by a wide
variety of Mandriva-related people, from developers through to your
humble editor.
--> http://planetmandriva.zarb.org

The Italian Linux website TuxJournal conducted a detailed and
wide-ranging interview with Ga=C3=ABl Duval, co-founder of Mandriva.
Topics covered included Ga=C3=ABl's history in computing, the Conectiva
merger, the Academia education program, and software patents in
Europe. Be sure to read the interview for an insight into Ga=C3=ABl's
work!
--> http://www.tuxjournal.net/intervista4-en.html

Of course, since the last newsletter, there have been several security
updates for Mandriva Linux, which every user should update to as soon
as possible. As always, we remind you to run Mandriva Update
regularly, or sign up to Mandriva Online at the link below for=20
automatic update notification and installation. Some of the bigger=20
updates released in the last month included a fix for a serious=20
vulnerability in php-pear, a kernel update to fix several=20
vulnerabilities, and an update to fix vulnerabilities in gaim - so=20
patch today!
--> http://store.mandriva.com/product_info.php?products_id74

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